X.—On new British Naked-eyed Medusce. — By C. W. Peach, 

 Edinburgh. 



Bead at the Spring Meeting, May 14, 1867. 



HAVING- lately, tlirough the kindness of scientific friends in 

 Edinburgh, had access to several excellent libraries, in which 

 are many rare and valuable works on Medusse, &c., I have been 

 induced to look over my notes and sketches made in by-gone 

 years, and have found that several which I had taken and marked 

 as differing from any that I had seen noticed or figured, are really 

 new. One of these was mentioned in a Paper of mine, " On the 

 Luminosity of the Sea," which was read at the Annual Meeting 

 of the Eoyal Institution of Cornwall in 1849; it was therein re- 

 corded as Willsia stellata of Forbes, and was so designated in 

 your Transactions of that year. It did not escape notice at the 

 time, that there were several differences between it and Forbes's ; 

 but as I was unwilling to increase the number of species, I let the_ 

 matter rest. Last winter, however, I read a Paper at one of the 

 meetings of the Royal Physical Society ; and among other dis- 

 coveries, this was mentioned; and some of the members, hard 

 workers in natural history, assured me that it was a good sjDecies, 

 and that it diflered widely from Willsia stellata. As the little 

 beauty occurred to me in Cornwall, and as I still have warm 

 recollections of that county and its people, I have named it 

 Willsia Cornubica. I am told that the generic name ought to 

 be Willia. I feel unwilling, however, to alter my late friend's 

 spelling. 



Forbes's specimen had twenty-four tentacula, springing from 

 as many marginal ocelli bulbs ; six ovaries, together forming a 

 beautiful star around the base of the stomach, with a gastro- 

 vascular canal from each ovary; these, half-way down the sub- 

 umbrella, divide into two, and these again divide into a like 

 number, and thus there are twenty-four canals, from which as 



